Coding
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Automatically Update npm Package Dependencies with Dependabot
Dependabot has historically been on the receiving end of many jokes and memes, from the world’s top Hacktoberfest participant to the occasional onslaught of inboxes when a widely popular package receives a security update. But buried in there was something important and highly useful that can help package maintainers and projects more sanely deal with …
Learn Next.js in 10 Tweets
Next.js has taken the web dev world by storm It’s the React framework devs rave about praising its power, flexibility, and dev experience Don’t feel like you’re missing out! Here’s everything you need to know in 10 tweets Let’s dive in 🧵 🐦 View & Share the Tweet Thread 1. Next.js is a React.js framework …
Colbyashi Maru
For a while I’ve sat on this idea of using the name Colbyashi Maru for some kind of fun content series. What the Colbyashi Maru? If you missed the reference, Colbyashi Maru is a play on the Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek, which is a training exercise presenting a “no win” scenario to those taking …
2020 Content Roundup – Year in Review
This year has been hard on pretty much everyone in the world, some more than others. It's led to a boom in content creation as people are forced to move to a digital life in a remote world and new learners looking to find a new career like learning how to code. Through this time, …
Lessons Learned: Building Geeky Ecommerce Product Experiences at ThinkGeek
Working at ThinkGeek was fun, challenging, and rewarding. Those experiences taught me how to be a better person and how to apply those experiences to my work. This post will focus on some of the takeaways from my time working at ThinkGeek. Learning from past experiences It’s about to cross the 4 year mark since …
Lessons Learned: Building My First Ebook 50 Projects for React & the Static Web
The process of writing an ebook provided a lot of value in helping me grow as both a developer and content creator. It’s helped me understand how I can more effectively educate others and reflect on things I already know. While I’ve ultimately now published a second ebook (Jamstack Handbook), this post will focus on …
Building Maps with React Leaflet – Course on egghead.io
If you’ve been following along with my work, I tend to talk about maps every so often. This includes tutorials like how to create a Coronavirus (COVID-19) statistics map or even how to create your own Santa Tracker. tl;dr my new course Building Maps with React Leaflet is now available on egghead.io! Why so much …
50 Projects for React & the Static Web
I’m proud to officially launch my first ebook 50 Projects for React & the Static Web. Ebook Cover This free ebook includes 50 project ideas complete with project briefs, a layout idea, and resources if you get stuck. I fully believe the best way to learn is by doing and this can help you stop …
You’re Allowed to Overengineer Your Blog
A common thread in web development thought pieces is why you shouldn’t use a certain framework on your blog or why simply, you shouldn’t overengineer it. But what can overengineering our personal projects like our blog do to help us grow as developers? What do I mean by overengineering a blog? One of the main …
Top 5 Things to Learn First with AWS and How to Get Started with Amazon Web Services
AWS has taken the tech community by storm. It’s easily sold as one of the most reliable providers with an exhaustive list of services from object storage to machine learning. But it can easily be overwhelming for someone new to the cloud. Where should you start when trying to learn AWS? Object storage with AWS …
How to Build Tech Communities in a World of Pandemic
The global pandemic has had widespread effects, not just in how we go to work or go out to eat, but how we socialize and network in our local tech communities. What impact does this have on our journeys and what can we do to make the best out of the current climate? Living in …
What’s the difference between a front end developer and back end developer?
Websites and applications are complex! Buttons and images are just the tip of the iceberg. With this kind of complexity, you need people to manage it, but which parts are the front end developers and back end developers responsible for? Originally written for freecodecamp.org. The many layers of development Whether you're working on a website …
How to Grow Your Audience and Share Your Content with the World
Building quality content can be a really rewarding task, but for those just starting out or those who don't yet have a large audience, that content can easily get buried amongst the other million tweets on Twitter. How can we expand our reach and help our content impact more people? Creating our content for the …
How is Design Important as a Developer and What Can You Do to Level Up?
Design is a part of the product process that often gets pushed off. This can come at a cost that your customers or other developers have to pay. How is design important for those of us who aren't just pushing pixels in Photoshop or Figma and what can we do to level up? Design as …
How MySpace Taught Me How to Code and Where You Should Look to Develop Your Passion
Learning something new is hard. It's even more challenging if you have a hard time trying to find motivation. How can we find things in our everyday lives that can help us learn? Tom is no longer in your extended network It's been almost 10 years since we saw massive changes underway at MySpace. If …
How to Write More Effectively and Develop Your Unique Style
Writing is an important way for all of us to share our thoughts and experiences. While the content itself is important, what else can we can do to more effectively get our thoughts across? Why is writing important in the first place? Everyone will develop their own reasons for why writing is important to them, but …
What is a Senior Developer and how can I become one?
Becoming a Senior Developer is something many of us strive for as we continue our code journey and build our career. But what does it actually mean to be a "Senior" Developer? What being a Senior Developer is not Before we start, let's get this out of the way. Contradictory to what you'll see on …
Overcoming Your Fear of Writing and How You Can Find Motivation
Writing about our work is one of those things that most of us have on our to-do list. But whether it's due to procrastination or fear, we never actually get to it. Here's some more motivation and reasons why you should give it a shot! Why should we write in the first place? Maybe you've …
Set Future You Up for Success with Good Coding Habits
Getting in the habit of being conscious of your coding decisions can make a difference not only as you build out your project, but also when you or your teammates try to revisit that project in the future. What kinds of things can we do to make it a little easier on our future self? …
How to set up a custom Mapbox basemap style with React Leaflet and Leaflet Gatsby Starter
Building maps can be pretty powerful, but often you're stuck with open source options for the map imagery that might not help the readability of your data. How can we leverage Mapbox's tile APIs to add a custom basemap to our React Leaflet app? What are we going to build? We're going to walk through …
How to create a Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard & Map App with Gatsby and Leaflet
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has swiftly changed how all of us interact day to day. How can we use available APIs to build a mapping app that shows the impact it has had on the world? Update: The original NovelCOVID API v1 endpoint has been deprecated. Please update and use the following instead: https://corona.lmao.ninja/v2/countries Author's …
How to Create a Summer Road Trip Mapping App with Gatsby and Leaflet
Get ready for the summer by building your own road trip mapping app with this step-by-step guide! Author's Note: Even though we're going through some challenging times, we can still be optimistic we'll get through this together and be able to enjoy our summer. Stay safe and wash your hands. ❤️ What are we going …
Anyone Can Map! Inspiration and an introduction to the world of mapping
Chef Gusteau was a visionary who created food experiences for the world to enjoy. How can we take his lessons and apply them to the world of mapping? Taking inspiration from a culinary great If you've seen the Pixar movie Ratatouille, you should know who Chef Gusteau is. He helped our "little chef" Remy the rat navigate the culinary world and become …
What is the JAMstack and how do I get started?
JAMstack sites are all the rage right now in the web dev world. And rightfully so! But what exactly is it and how can we all take advantage of its benefits? What is this JAMstack? To start, JAMstack is a software architecture and philosophy that adheres to the following components: Javascript, APIs, and Markup. If this sounds …
How to Become a Full Stack Web Developer in 2020
Full stack web developers are the Swiss Army knife of the code world. Having that designation means you can produce end to end solutions, which is a highly marketable and agile skillset. But what does it actually take to achieve that status? Translations: Korean, Chinese First off, what really makes a developer full stack? It’s …
Create your own Santa Tracker with Gatsby and React Leaflet
The Christmas season is a magical time of year. We have Santa flying around spreading cheer and Elf roaming around New York during our yearly rewatch with family and friends. To get in the spirit, we’re going to spin up a web app that includes a map that tracks Santa on it! Edit 12/23: Updated …
How to use Google Tag Manager to maintain Google Analytics and other marketing tags
Managing code snippets and pixels on your website or app to measure traffic can be a little bit stressful, especially if you have a marketing team that constantly needs to make changes. Luckily, there are tools out there like Google Tag Manager that will make them a little easier to wrangle. What is Google Tag …
Don’t just lint your code, fix it with Prettier
Linting makes everyone’s lives easier by telling us what’s wrong with our code, but how can we avoid doing the actual work that goes into fixing it? Previously I wrote about linting, what it is, and how it makes your life easier. At the end, I actually included a way that you could automatically fix …
What is linting and how can it save you time?
One of the biggest challenges in software development is time. It’s something we can’t easily get more of, but linting can help us make the most out of the time we have. So what is linting? lint, or a linter, is a tool that analyzes source code to flag programming errors, bugs, stylistic errors, and …
What is Gatsby and why it’s time to get on the hype train?
Frameworks come and go, and while Gatsby may eventually drift as tech does, the performance and productivity boosts are strong arguments for diving in right away. Wait up, what is Gatsby? Gatsby is a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build blazing fast websites and apps Their emphasis (I’ll explain …
Making Sense of Google Analytics and the Traffic to Your Website
Google Analytics is a powerful web service that gives you insights into your website or application. What exactly is it and how can it help? I’m going to cover a few things here. If you’re already familiar with the basics, feel free to skip through: What is Google Analytics? (Overview) Okay, so where do I …
Put Down the Javascript – Learn HTML & CSS
A growing trend in front end development is the idea that you can dive right in to Javascript and succeed. Honestly, for better or worse you probably can, but you’re just building on top of a fragile foundation that will come back to bite you. Why do I need HTML or CSS? The UI frameworks …
You Don’t Need CSS-in-JS – Why I Use Stylesheets
CSS-in-JS is all the rage. But is it really the best option? Solving problems you don't need to solve Don't get me wrong, CSS-in-JS is a great solution, but it's for a problem most people don't have. Maintaining your components in a very siloed approach absolutely helps things like: Unintentional side effects of cascading styles …
Destructuring the Fundamentals of React Hooks
Hooks have become a pretty powerful new feature of React, but they can be intimidating if you’re not really sure what’s going on behind the scenes. The beauty is now being able to manage state in a simple (and reusable) manner within function components. But why not just use a class? Without getting too far …
Reliable and Maintainable Google Analytics in Webpack
One of the messier bits of a new app setup is trying to figure out where to stash your Google Analytics initialization scripts. There are some existing options like React Helmet, to manage the head of your document, or you can simply toss it in your monolithic index.html file. The thing is, those setups never …
Stop using custom templates in your Webpack React apps
Google "webpack react" and you'll notice the top result guides all have one thing in common: they create custom HTML templates for their React applications. See, React apps need a root node that serves as a mounting point when rendering to the DOM, so most times you'll simply see a <div> with an ID of …
Easily Maintain HTML Partials in Webpack Based Javascript Applications
Webpack, even with the HTML Webpack Plugin, doesn’t necessarily give a graceful way of managing simple HTML snippets without putting together ugly custom templates within inline loaders. Moving them to the application itself is sometimes an option, with things like title tags using React Helmet, but that doesn’t necessarily work with requirements such as analytics …
How do you find all of those blog posts?
I'm pretty active on Slack (most active, ahem…). I like to chat, because I believe strong communication is super helpful for teams, but it’s also a lot of fun (gifs, memes, etc). Straddling that line, I post articles I come across in relevant channels that I think others would appreciate or learn from, and typically …
Custom Blacklist Contact Form 7
Easily set up a blacklist for those marketing lists that somehow get around Akismet. Throw the below in your functions.php file and customize the $blacklist array to filter by email address to your liking. function contactFilterBlacklist( $result, $tag ) { $tag = new WPCF7_Shortcode( $tag ); $blacklist = array( 'filterme' ); $yourEmail = isset( $_POST['your-email'] ) ? …
Batch PNG Optimization
Easily create a script to batch optimize PNG files in Photoshop using TinyPng's Photoshop Plugin and Adobe's ExtendScript Toolkit. Jump over to voormedia for the How-To. Compressing Images via voormedia TinyPNG Photoshop Plugin
dpkg-scanpackages Stripping Name Field
dpkg-scanpackages isn't designed to take in some of the user defined fields Cydia repos use. Saurik points out in his How to Host a Cydia Package post how to easily fix this. This is rather easy: simply add "Name", "Author", "Homepage", and "Icon" to the end of the array "fieldpri". Not sure which one the …
Sync your SublimeText2 settings with DropBox
Check out the details at packagecontrol.io
hippify Javascript Plugin
Created this script with the need to swap high resolution images in when high ppi, non-mobile displays are detected. hippify on GitHub
Asynchronous Javascript Loading
These posts are going to be short until I reformat all of the previous ones. With that in mind, saved a couple seconds loading time on a project I'm working on by simply loading social media javascript links asynchronously. Easy to implement and cleans the code up quite a bit! Thinking Async on CSS-Tricks
